Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Impressions, momentary
and vivid, would wash over him: a potter’s vermilion glaze; the sky-vault
filled with stars that were also gods; the moon, from which a lion had fallen….

My chills of recognition make me pause, just three lines
into the story. Borges named this one after himself: “The Maker”, El Hacedor. Previous translators
squirmed at the title “The Maker”. They thought people might confuse it with
Our Maker; they feared leaving sulphurous traces of a heresiarch. So they
considered and sometimes used “The Poet”, “The Artificer”, “Il Fabbro”. But
Borges chose the English himself. And yes, he meant maker of worlds.
The maker wrote this as he was nearing
blindness in the vast library in Buenos Aires whose flying books had made love
and married and danced the tango and fought with knives inside his mind. I can
think of no one, not even Jung, who has housed so many books in his head and
incited so much action between them. Borges was now engaged in constructing a
total library in the imaginal realm, his version of paradise. Never a tame
library, but one where wild things are.

...the moon, from which a
lion had fallen….

I am seized again
with wild familiarity, the hot breath at my neck, claws at my kidneys.
Borges’ line has a rhyming cousin,
short, stocky and flat-faced, wearing a robe of skins hung with bronze mirrors.
I know where to find it. I keep it locked
behind glass doors, along with the Red Book,The Golden Bough and other books that like to flap about and prowl in the night.
Sometimes the doors rattle and the
key turns unassisted but today, things are quiet and I must fetch the book myself.
It was published in Oxford five years after Borges died, so he could not have
known it but might have known some of its sources. Its words are spun from
conversations with shamans and elders of the Daur Mongols, lovers of horses,
fermented mare’s milk, and drums that they ride to other worlds.
Like Borges, these shamans are forever
talking about tigers and lions. While Borges tried to make dreamtigers and was
never quite satisfied, around Hailar or the Nomin River it’s not hard. Lie by
the water watching butterflies and a tiger twice as long as you may come for
you, as it would come for a tethered goat.
Out here the lion may demand a deeper
seeing, since you won’t see lions in Daur country with your ordinary eyes.
The Oxford anthropologist asks a
Daur shaman, Urgunge Onon, about this. He speaks from the tellings, which is how his people describe their traditional
knowledge. Anthropologists may know about shamanism but the people who practice
it in the old ways don’t have any “isms” in their vocabulary.
Urgunge says, “Wild animals of the
forest have two kings [khan], the
tiger [tasaga] and the lion [arsalang].
“Lion?” The anthropologist is
amazed. “But you don’t have lions in Manchuria.”
“They will be thinking of …er..what
is it in English? Leopard. Leopard is just like lion, is that right?”
“But you don’t have leopards
either.”
“No, that is true. So the
conclusion is: in reality the khan of animals is the tiger; in imagination the
khan is also the lion, even if we do not have lions in Mongolia. Everybody
knows the story of the lion who jumped to catch the moon, then it died, you
see. This is definitely the lion. The tiger never did that.”
The lion who fell from the moon did
not really die, of course. Borges knows that. So does Henri Rousseau, called the Customs Man.
Some nights, coming in or out of
sleep, I feel him lying with me on the bed, back to back.

Saturday, December 27, 2014

If you choose to venture into Jung's Red Book, I strongly advise you to do so more cautiously than I did. I stayed with it for three days and nights, without much sleep, following Jung on his Underworld journey. There was one moment, in particular, when I became very angry with him. He recounts a vision in which he comes upon the mutilated corpse of a murdered girl, and this fills him with grief and rage. A veiled woman appears and tells him he must remove the child's liver and eat part of it, to atone for the crime. He must take on the guilt, because he is a man and a man was responsible. Jung writhes in resistance, disgusted and horrified, but finally complies.I kneel down on the stone, cut off a piece of the liver and put it in my mouth.My gorge rises - tears burst from my eyes - cold sweat covers my brow - dull sweet taste of blood - I swallow with desperate efforts - it is impossible - once again and once again - I almost faint - it is done. The horror has been accomplished. [1]I wanted to throw the book across the room, but stopped myself, reflecting that this tombstone of a tome would break the furniture. I read on. The woman who commanded this cannibal act throws back her veil, revealing a lovely face, and tells Jung, "I am your soul." You will need a strong stomach for some of this. And you will need to be ready to accompany Jung, quite literally, in and out of the madhouse. But persistence will be rewarded. The Red Book, never intended for public consumption, is essential and fascinating reading for those who want to understand the price Jung paid for his gifts. He went down into private hells and depths of madness and he got himself out. We see him struggling heroically to find a vocabulary and a model of understanding for his experiences, weaving for himself the ladders of words that will help to get him out of the pit. We see the seething cauldron from which his greatest work would eventually emerge. Jung culled the material for the Red Book - whose fine calligraphy and vivid illustrations and decorative features make it resemble a medieval illuminated manuscript - from the journals ('black books") he kept during the years of his "confrontation with the unconscious", when he walked the razor's edge between madness and genius. As he describes it, the "spirit of the depths" ripped him out of the comfortable, rational assumptions of the "spirit of our times" and dragged him, night after night, through the terrifying stages of Underworld initiation.

- In a crater in a dark and terrifying world below, where black snakes threaten to destroy a red sun, he meets the prophet Elijah and his "daughter" Salome, the evil beauty responsible for the decapitation of John the Baptist in the Bible. Salome tells Jung - to his amazement and confusion- that they are brother and sister, the children of Mother Mary. Disbelieving and fearing for his sanity, Jung yells at her that she and the Elijah figure are only "symbols". Elijah reproves him, saying, "We are just as real as your fellow men. You solve nothing by calling us symbols." Jung's Elijah also instructs him that "your thoughts are just as much outside your self as trees or animals are outside the body." [2]

- While he is trying to continue to lead a normal life, as a prominent psychoanalyst and the father of five children. Jung's sense of reality is being shaken by the raw power of his night visions, and by synchronistic phenomona during his days when he feels the forces of a deeper world pushing through. In December 1913, in a well-cut suit, he gives a polished lecture to the Zurich Psychoanalytical Society. Three nights later, he tells Elijah, "It seems to me as if I were more real here" - in the Underworld - "yet I do not like to be here." [3]

As Jung confessed, anyone reading the last chapters of Liber Primus, the first part of the Red Book, out of context might conclude that the author was crazy. Brilliant and erudite, but crazy. Yet from such perilous adventures out there beyond the roped-in precinct of sanity, Jung derived his ideas about "psychological objectivity", one of the most stimulating elements in his later work. From his dialogues with his dream characters and his efforts to integrate and balance the powers that moved with them he developed his practice of active imagination. Jung told the Dutch artist Roland Horst that he developed his work Psychological Types from 30 pages of his Red Book [4], apparently the pages in which the encounters with Elijah and Salome take place and in which - after Jung has been squeezed by a giant black snake until the blood gushes out of him and his head has become that of a lion - Salome tells him, "You are Christ". [5]

- Looking back on this passage in his inner and transpersonal life in 1925, from across the divide of the catastrophic Great War that some of his visions had foreshadowed, Jung told a seminar that "You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them. If you can overcome your fear of the unconscious and can let yourself go down, then these facts take on a life of their own. You can be gripped by these ideas so much that you really go mad, or nearly so. These images...form part of the ancient mysteries; in fact, it is such fantasies that made the mysteries." [6]

"I fell into the mystery," Jung states after he has been squeezed by the black snake and saluted by Salome [7]. Reading the Red Book, we see the enormity of the price Jung paid for his wisdom, and come to appreciate the extent of his courage and eventual self-mastery. This is a record of a thoroughly shamanic descent to the Underworld, and of long testing and initiation in houses of darkness from which lesser minds and feebler spirits might never have managed to find their way back.

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Though I'm a mere man who's never even carried a "European shoulder bag", I've come to know a bit about women's pocketbooks, and especially how they feature in dreams. I've talked with hundreds of women about their dreams of handbags over the years. In leading dream theater in my workshops I've been struck by how often a pocketbook has proven to be a key element in the drama - lost or stolen, at risk, flaunted or misused or swung as a weapon.

The handbag in a dream may of course be just a handbag, one that needs to be checked or kept safe. Everyone knows someone who's had a handbag nabbed by a mugger, sometimes after dreaming this exact event, while failing to recognize a quite literal warning. If you tell me a dream in which your pocketbook is lost or stolen, my first step will be to encourage you to look for clues in the dream as to when and where this could happen, so you can avoid this situation in the future. We also know people who have rushed off to the airport without a passport or driver's license. So if you tell me you dreamed something like that, my first advice to you will be to check that you have your travel documents before you leave home on your next trip. Now let's consider the symbolism of a pocketbook and what it contains. By my observation, a woman's handbag often contains:

Each of these literal items is rich in symbolism. Together, they represent power and identity, things we don't want to lose or have taken from us. One woman dreamed she was fighting off a giant panther with her pocketbook. That's power! She held up her own side so well that in a later dream the panther reappeared as her friend, purring like a kitty. Another woman dreamed she was at the office and kept leaving her pocketbook in a place where it was vulnerable. In the dream, she couldn't break this habit, even though she knew that a creepy man who might be a robber was prowling the halls and snooping around her things. When I invited her to compare the behavior of her dream self to that of her waking self, she was able to come up with an action plan that involved not giving up her power in her work situation. Another woman dreamed she had left her purse in church and needed to go back to retrieve it. She felt this reflected the fact that for part of her life, as a devout member of her congregation, she had given up her right to direct knowledge of the sacred, and was now reclaiming that. A woman's pocketbook can represent her sexuality. You don't have to be a Freudian to see the possible sexual associations with the way it opens and closes. The catch on the vintage photo used here is actually called a "kissing lock". I remember wildly funny dream theater back during the (Bill) Clinton presidency in which we play-acted a dream in which Bill is trying to get into a woman's purse. Eons ago, at a dream conference, I couldn't miss the the sexual character of this type of dream while doing a dreamwork process with an attractive woman from Texas . In her dream, she is repeatedly and compulsively opening her purse and snapping it shut. As she recounted the dream, in front of 200 people, she couldn't stop herself vamping and gyrating.

Again, a bag can just be a bag. I had a recurring motif in dreams over a period of 18 months - that a little grey carry-on bag I always took with me on trips was lost or stolen. The context was different in each of these dreams, but the outcome was the same. The dreams prompted me not to carry my passport or valuables in that bag, which was a good thing, because 18 months after the first lost-bag dream, that grey carry-on was stolen from a car I rented in California. There was symbolism in the literal event that followed the dream. On the day it was stolen, that grey carry-on bag contained a working draft of a book I later decided not to publish.

Playing with our dream symbols is fun. We also need to be more literal about dreams and more symbolist about the incidents of waking life. That's my bag.

Monday, December 15, 2014

Walking
a lake shore, I come upon something small and white and solitary on the wet
sand. From my original angle of vision, it looks like a tiny ribcage. When I
come closer, I see it is a sandal with many straps. I feel I am looking at a
symbol from a dream. Abandoned between the confident lakefront mansions and the
cold lake, looking so much like part of a little person, the lone sandal makes
me think of soul - a part of soul that has been left somewhere away from home.

In dreams, the state of our footwear
often suggests the state of our souls. You can hear the echo of
"soul" in "sole". A dream of lost shoes may invite us to
think about where on the roads of life we may have lost or misplaced soul. Sometimes
you can reach back into that kind of dream in order to look for lost shoes, and
that search may take you back to a place in your life where you lost something
more important - vital energy and identity - that you can now reclaim.

Shoes not only have soles. They have
ties, and the state of your laces or straps in a dream may say something about
connections - "old ties" or new ones. A woman getting ready to attend
a high school reunion in Manhattan dreamed she was urgently seeking shoes that
would be comfortable for walking yet smart enough to suit her taste. A salesman
in Bloomingdale's persuaded her to purchase a pair of sneakers with laces made
of genuine, but flexible, gold. She smiled at the thought that after all the
years since graduation, her ties to her classmates were "golden", and
that she would be comfortable with them in the big city.

A Freudian psychiatrist I know
dreamed that her shoes were far too tight; they were torturing her feet and
making it nearly impossible for her to walk. When she reflected on this, she
realized that her Freudian approach was cramping her ability to do her job. She
expanded her studies, embracing Jung and other approaches to the psyche and its
healing. Now, in her dreams, her shoes fitted just right.

In some dreams, we find ourselves
wearing shoes that would be highly unlikely in regular life, except at a
costume party. We seem to be cross-dressing, or wearing the footwear of a
different historical period, or dispensing with shoes altogether in a primal
landscape. When we inspect the bodies we inhabit in dreams of this kind, we
sometimes discover that our dream self slipped into someone else's situation,
in a different place or a different era. The state of our shoes in such dreams
(and other details) may be a clue to connections within a soul family that
includes personalities in different times.

That thought has been of great
interest to me since I dreamed that I visited my favorite professor at a
research institution where he was doing some remarkable work that involved
pairs of shoes. The professor is Manning Clark, the famous Australian
historian, who was a great friend and mentor to me when I was a student and a
precocious lecturer at the Australian National University. Manning died in 1991,
but I have had many intriguing encounters with him since. In the dream
involving shoes, Manning showed me that he is now busily engaged in studying
"parallel lives". This meta-historical approach seems to involve
tracking how choices made and actions taken by two people living in different
times impact each other's fortunes, by a process of causation that you can only
grasp if you can step outside linear chronology. One of the pairs Manning had
selected for study was Lenin and Dionysius of Syracuse (a tyrant of ancient Greece).
Each time the professor finished work on one set of parallel lives, he moved a
pair of shoes to a different position on the far side of his desk. This was
evidently a kind of tally, but I felt the shoes signified something more.

I am thinking now of that lone
sandal on the lake beach. There is a sandal angel, very important in the
pathworking and astral travel protocols of certain Mystery and kabbalistic
orders. His name is Sandalphon. He wears sandals in the presence of his Maker,
and leather footgear in the presence of Shekinah, the Divine Feminine. Some say
he was once the prophet Elijah, or Elias. He presides over the astral body and
the soul journeys we make in this vehicle. Some believe he watches over the big
journeys that precede birth and follow death, which involve putting on and
discarding "garments", like soft shoes. I think also of the symbolism of everyday life. The other day, I noticed a pair of women's high-heeled shoes, muddied and scuffed, abandoned under a tree on a gritty urban street. And I thought again about those dreams in which shoes that are lost or abandoned can reflect soul loss.

In my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home, I discuss shoe dreams as one of the main categories of dreams that encourage us to ask where soul has gone and make sure that we have proper grounding when we are walking our soul paths. The state of our soles may indeed reflect the state of our souls.

Sunday, December 14, 2014

One recurring theme in my dreams, and maybe yours, over many years, is
that my road is blocked by construction work. In one of these dreams, I found a
road completely impassable with great hills of rubble and huge bulldozers ahead
of me. I woke frustrated, and decided to try to get back inside the dream and
find a way forward. When I reentered the dream, I discovered I had a companion
I hadn't noticed before. He looked like an impossibly beautiful, radiant double
of myself. He wasn't blocked by the construction, He shot up something like a
storm drain, flying Superman-style. Then it hit me - I'm dreaming and I can
fly. I flew up the tunnel after him, and entered one of the most powerful
life-changing experiences of my life.
Since then, I still find my road blocked at times, in my dreams,
and often don't remember that I can fly. Sometimes I have to turn back, or wait
my time (as we have to do on a highway when there is literal construction and
flagmen determining when we can stop or go). Sometimes my dream self does
something as cool as flying but different. On quite a few nights, he has solved the problem of a blocked road by picking up his car as if it's a toy and lifting it over the obstacles.
A variant is coming to a point where the road is unfinished,
or the bridge just stops halfway across a body or water or an overpass. Those
dreams make me want to look very carefully at what direction I'm following in
my work and my life and check whether that's really the way I want to go. If it
is, then I'll consider what roadwork I need to do in order to go forward.

It's cool to remember, in dreams, that we can fly. It can also be very helpful to be reminded that we have work to do and given some orientation on how to approach that. Of course, a dream of difficult road conditions may be a quite literal travel advisory. So when you dream of a road being blocked, don't fail to ask whether you recognize that location and might be driving somewhere like that. Recognizing a dream rehearsal of this kind can save a lot of aggravation on the ordinary roads. At the same time, a precognitive or admonitory dream may still hold great symbolic resonance. The dream may anticipate a literal event in external reality that will, in itself, he highly symbolic. One more thought about dreams of construction. Whether the work is being done on a road, or a house, or something else in a dream, you may want to pause to reflect on whether what is really under construction is you.

Saturday, December 13, 2014

"In the Norse heaven of our forefathers, Thor's house had
five hundred and forty floors; and man's house has five hundred and forty
floors." The voice is that of Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay "Conduct of Life". We begin to see the truth of it in
dreams in which we discover that our home has an extra level, or many of them. I have yet to meet a dreamer who claims to have discovered all five hundred and forty floors. Yet when we discover even a single room we had not opened before, we discover that we are more than we know.

To spin from Norse gods to the Bible, in the dream house,
there are many mansions - extra stories and hidden rooms and basements, wings of possibility.

The state of a dream
house may reflect the state of the body. If the dream house is in need of
repairs, or there's a problem with the plumbing or the furnace, you may want to consider whether there is a health advisory concerning a corresponding part of the body..

Different rooms in the dream house may represent different
functions, of body or soul. The kitchen may represent the digestive system, or
the state of the family, or of our creativity (since the kitchen is the place
where we cook things up and often the hub of family life).When I'm living in an
apartment in my dreams (which I have not done in waking life for 30 years) I
ask myself "what am I a part of, or apart from?"

I love the sense of
expanding life possibility that comes when I am in a dream house that has levels
or rooms beyond any physical house I know.

I'm intrigued by how
life memories help design my dream houses, which are sometimes composites of
several past places where I have lived.

When I find myself
moving to a new place in my dreams, I'll ask myself whether this could be
preview of a literal house move (maybe one I haven't yet considered in ordinary
life). I'll also ask: what changes in my life situation are in store for me in
a larger sense?

In dreams, we often
find ourselves back in the old place, a childhood home or a home we shared with
a former partner. Being back in the old place could be a journey back across
time, or into a parallel reality in which a parallel self never left the old
situation - and/or an invitation to reclaim vital soul energy and identity we
left behind when we made a major life change.

There are dream houses
that are not of this world, places of learning and adventure and initiation in
the Imaginal Realm. These may be places of encounter with a second self, an
aspect of our multidimensional Self. Over many years, I have found myself
traveling in dreams to an old house on a canal in Europe, the home of an
eccentric scholar who is something of a magus, with an extraordinary library
and collection of working tools of magic. It took me a couple of visits before
I recognized that this dream house belongs to me,

Jung's dream of a
"many-storied house" led him for the first time to the concept of the
"collective unconscious" (and also to his rift with Freud, who
refused to accept the depth of this dream). Jung found in his multi-level dream
house a "structural diagram of the human psyche." In the dream, he
became aware that there was a story below the respectable middle-class
environment in which he was living. When he went downstairs, he found
successive stories below his previous consciousness: a darkened floor with
medieval furnishings, and below that a beautifully vaulted Roman cellar, and
down below that - when he lifted a stone slab by a ring - a primal cave with
scattered bones and pottery and the two skulls.

Image: The so-called "Wooden Gagster" house in Archangel, Russia, built without permit or architect, demolished in 2008. Photo credit: Wikipedia, Mr 850

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

"We were in Virginia and like always, my grandson got into bed with me to tell me his dream. In this one , he was in a forest of mean trees. The trees all had faces and arms and he had lots of sticks and rocks to throw at them. There was one little squirrel and he wanted to save him from the trees. He asked me to draw it and I made a quick sketch.

"Later that day we took a ride to a Christmas event at Busch Gardens. Old Country was set up as European countries, all decorated for Christmas. "We crossed the bridge into Ireland and there was his tree. He said, 'See this is the tree was that in my dream last night.' Then he ran into it. It is the tree in the photo I took.

"it is so important to get children started young believing in the power of dreams."

In dreams, perhaps every night, we travel ahead of our physical selves, scouting out challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. Dreams of the future are part of the basic human survival kit. We not only see things that will happen. We see things that may or may not happen, depending on our ability to remember and clarify the details, and then to take appropriate action to avoid an unwanted possible future event or to manifest a happy one. This is part of our natural intuitive radar. It has helped humans to survive for the whole of our odyssey on the planet, and most human societies, until recently, have valued dreams and dreamers that can show us the shape of things to come. So why are so many of us missing our dream messages about challenges and opportunities that lie ahead? For a majority, perhaps, this is part of the cost of suffering a substantial dream drought, missing dreams with every kind of content. But even those of us who love to dream and make room in our lives for dreams often fail to notice what they reveal about the possible future. We have often been oriented by Western psychology and popular methods of dream interpretation to look only at the symbolic, as opposed to the literal, content of dreams. A widespread theory is that whatever is going on a dream report is a purely subjective, internal transaction between the personal unconscious and the conscious mind. This might lead us to look at every character and element in the dream as an aspect of the dreamer. This can be a fun game to play, but it fails to recognize that dreams are not only personal and subjective experiences. They can also be transpersonal, social and take us to other times and other realities. When we look at our own dreams, we are naturally inclined to home in on what we recognize from the past, because the past is what we know or suppose that we know. But dreams are actually organized by the future more than the past. They show us things developing within us and around us. They show us events that could play out in the future, for good or ill. In other words, they show us possible futures. We can improve our odds on manifesting a desirable possible future event, or averting, gentling or avoiding an unwanted one if we are able to look at our dream material - whatever its content - and ask, Is there any chance that this could manifest, literally or symbolically, in the future? If we feel the answer is "Yes", we may want to spend some time clarifying the dream information. The best way to do that, whenever we are able to do it, is to reenter the dream in a conscious journey and take a closer look at what is going on in the space of the dream, carrying the questions any investigator might bring along: What? When" Where? Who? How? Simply carrying the dream with us for a while, walking with it, seeing whether more of the detail comes back is another way to approach this. We'll get in the habit of noticing when incidents come up in the world around us that resemble scenes from the dream, and perhaps we'll find ourselves better poised to cope with what is coming next. It will help for us to make a list of personal markers that a dream may reflect coming events. One such marker may be the routine, everyday quality of a dream, reflecting situations that may come up in ordinary life. You may notice clues to the passage of time in a dream - the kids are older, the season has changed. Some markers of dream premonition or precognition may be wildly symbolic. You may notice that you dream of a tsunami or a train rushing off the tracks when a crisis is looming in your life (but don't forget a tsunami could also be a tsunami, a train wreck a train wreck). For highly psychic dreamers, the lively presence of dead people in a dream is sometimes a marker that information about the future is available. The dead, who are of course alive on the other side, are not confined to time as we know it, and can show us things - if they choose and if they have clarity - that we have trouble seeing by ourselves. However, even the most active dreamers, with good recall and a clear understanding that dreams must be searched for clues to the future, often miss messages of this kind. In my book Dreaming TrueI suggested five main reasons why we misinterpret dreams of the future even when we are fully prepared to look at dreams for messages about what is to come:1. We mistake a literal event for a symbolic one, or vice versa.2. We misidentify people and places.3. We fail to figure out how far in the future the dream event might be.4. We see future events from a certain angle, that may not reveal the whole picture.5. We confuse realities, confounding a dream that relates to external reality with dreams that are real experiences in other orders of reality.Gifted psychic dreamers often find themselves looking at a future event involving others as an observer, looking in from the outside. But in clairvoyant or precognitive dreams involving others, we may be drawn inside another person’s situation. Sometimes it’s as if we have stepped inside someone else’s head and are looking through their eyes. This syndrome is quite common among siblings, close family and friends. It poses special challenges in reading dreams of the future. We need to determine what is our stuff and what belongs to someone else's stuff. One of the ways to do that is through dream reentry, which means seeking to reenter a dream and establish – inside the dream space– exactly what is going on. I counseled a woman who was troubled by recurring dreams in which she saw her husband cheating on her and working himself into violent alcoholic rages in which he attacked her and was a danger to himself as well. She was not initially keen on the idea of trying to go back inside these horrible dreams, but I encouraged her to go in as an investigator and get the facts straight. With the help of my shamanic drumming, she succeeded in reentering the dream. She realized very quickly that the locale was not her own home, but her sister's place. Even more revealing, she found that in the disturbing dreams she had not been herself. She actually seemed to be inside the body and situation of her sister. She now understood that she had been given insight into terrible problems that had been developing in her sister's marriage by being taken right inside her sister's situation. Now that she had clarity on what belonged to her and what did not, the dreamer was able to talk to her sister, who admitted that she was having the problems seen in the dreams. Now the dreamer could provide loving and helpful counsel and support to her sister, who had been feeling desperately alone.

Monday, December 8, 2014

There is a commotion outside. I go to the window and see an
army is encamped along the edge of a body of water where a battle is taking
place between a giant turtle (the size of a dozen men) and a giant crocodile. I
call to the others to come and see. When I turn back, I see that the army has
saved the turtle, which is being transported to safer waters. They have
constructed or opened a kind of raceway and the turtle is swimming between
walls. Now I see that there are actually two giant turtles.
I look out to the water again. Beyond
military lines, the crocodile stands on a headland, tail raised like a
scorpion, apparently triumphant for now. I understand that the conflict will be
resumed. It's part of life. The role of the army is to ensure that neither
party destroys the other.

I woke from this first dream of the night feeling both
excited and satisfied. In the dream, I was an observer. I felt that I was being
shown something of huge importance in life.
I know both Turtle and Crocodile as members of
my personal mythic bestiary. I have swum with sea turtles and I am from a
country famous for crocodiles. I know that in life there are contests between
opposing forces and attitudes that must continue if life itself is to go on.
Instead of spending much time in
self-analysis of the dream, I made a quick drawing and decided to ask Jung for
a second opinion. Who better? I had already had it in mind to do my daily
bibliomancy with Jung’s Memories, Dreams,
Reflections, a book of seminal importance in my life and the most personal
and accessible of his works. However, when I reached into the Jung section in a
glass-fronted bookcase in my personal library, the shelf elves had other ideas.
Another volume in Jung’s Collected Works came flying off the shelf, striking me
lightly on the chest.
Naturally, I changed my ideas about
where to look for guidance and took this flying book to my desk. Its title is Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
which seemed to match the revelation of the two turtles in my dream rather
nicely. The volume is a dual edition of two of his early essays, Volume VII in
the Collected Works. I opened the book at random and read this:

"There is no energy unless there is a tension of
opposites; hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of
the conscious mind...Repressed content must be made conscious so as to produce
a tension of opposites, without which no forward movement is possible…Just as
high always longs for low and hot for cold, so all consciousness, perhaps
without being aware of it, seeks its unconscious opposite, lacking which it is
doomed to stagnation, congestion and ossification. Life is born only of the
spark of opposites."

I saw that there was no need to invent a snapper to carry
the essence of my dream. Jung had given me one. Life is born only of the spark of opposites.

This little incident from this dreamer’s life is a practical
example of how we can turn to a book to give us a second opinion on a dream.
Our curiosity may of course take us far beyond the initial passage we find when
we open a book at random. I found myself drawn, irresistibly, to-read both the
essays in that volume of Jung, in which we find his mind devising and
developing theories of aspect psychology, the shadow and the relations between
the ego-self and the collective unconscious which were to become fundamental to
his approach.Drawing by RM

Saturday, December 6, 2014

Yaminahua shamans in Peruvian Amazonia use complex, opaque metaphorical language in their power songs, which are their most important tools for journeying and opening an interactive space with the spirits – and for bringing energy and healing through. This is called, literally, “twisting-twisting words”. One shaman explains that with ordinary words, you’ll “crash” in this deeper reality; “twisting words” let you circle around and see. Wherever the old ways of dreaming and soul healing are still alive, poets of consciousness - those born and dreamed to be our shamans and Speakers - know what this means.We'll never be able to travel the song lines and the story lines into the space where worlds are made and can be recreated until we come up with our own fresh words. We need twisting words to change and twist the behavior of the body, in the direction of health, and to re-weave tangled or torn energy webs. We need to twist and shout our way out of the boxes, constructed by limited and self-limiting belief systems, that we sometimes mistake for home. Keeping a journal and letting fresh words and images burst from our dreams and adventures is a way of putting yourself on the way to becoming a poet of consciousness who can offer word doctoring in this way.

Friday, December 5, 2014

"The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born." This beautiful, passionate statement was made by W.H. Auden and it takes us right inside the crucible in which all creative action is born. It's sexy, it's spiritual, it makes your heart beat faster, it puts a champagne fizz of excitement into the air. It suffuses everything around with incredible light, so you feel you are seeing the curve of a flower stem or the bubbles in a glass for the very first time.

Such depth, such passion, such focused rapture is not only the province of poets, though we may need poetic speech to suggest what and how it is. Are you with me now? I am talking about you, and me, and the creative leap we can and will make as the year turns. The essence of the creative act is to bring something new into the world. You may have no earthly idea, at this moment, about how exactly you can do that.

So let me offer some eminently practical guidance, based on what Auden said about the roots of creation. Start by marrying your field.

What is your field? It's not work in the ordinary sense, or what your diplomas say you are certified to do, or how you describe yourself in a job resume - although it can encompass all of those things. Your field is where you ache to be. Your field is what you will do, day or night, for the sheer joy of the doing, without counting the cost or the consequences. Your field is the territory within which you can do The Work that your deeper life is calling you to do. Your field is not limitless. You can't bring anything into creative manifestation without accepting a certain form or channel, which requires you to set limits and boundaries. So your field is also the place within which the creative force that is in you will develop a form.

If you are going to bring something new into your world, find the field you will marry, as the poet marries language, as the artist marries color and texture, as the chef marries taste and aroma, as the swimmer marries the water.

Let's say that you have a notion that your creative act may involve writing. Maybe you even think you have a book, or a story or screenplay in you. For you, marrying the field will require you to marry words, and be their constant lover. You'll engage in orgies of reading, have tantric sex with a first (or third) draft. You'll kiss your lover in the morning by writing before you go out into the world, and when you go out you'll gather bouquets for your sweetheart by collecting fresh material from the call of a bird, the rattle of a streetcar, the odd accent of that guy on the cellphone, that unexpected phrase in the ad in the subway car.

You'll work at all this, because marriages aren't always sweet. Some days you may hardly be on speaking terms. Some days you feel your partner hates you or is cheating on you with someone else, maybe the fellow who just got a piece in the New Yorker or is merely in front of the mike in the neighborhood poetry slam. But you carry on. You fetch the groceries. You tuck your partner up in bed at night, and promise to dream together.

And out of this constancy - through tantrums and all - will come that blaze of creation when the sun shines at midnight, when time will stop or speed for you as you will, when you are so deep in the Zone that no move can be wrong. Depending on your choice of theme and direction, you may find you are joined by other creative intelligences, reaching to you from across time and dimensions in that blessed union that another poet, Yeats, defined as the "mingling of minds".

When the sun no longer shines at midnight, when you are back on clock time, you won't waste yourself regretting that today you're not in the Zone. You are still married. You'll do the work that now belongs to The Work.

Thursday, December 4, 2014

When I am at home, I start the day by holding my memories of my dream adventures in my mind before getting out of bed. I want to be able to replay the best of my overnight movies. I am eager to harvest what can give guidance and juice for the day. Sometimes I want to dwell on details and bring back a full narrative report. Sometimes I am happy to let details fade and simply hold the heart of a dream, or a single thread I can pull to bring back the rest at another time, or follow back through the labyrinth of the dream space. While many in our society are suffering from a dream drought, some of us are so prolific in our dream recall that we risk swamping ourselves with too much information. Less can be more. When I have wrapped my head around enough of what happened in my night expeditions, I have a quick gulp of coffee before walking my little dog, who has been waiting patiently for me to return to his world. My dream will walk with us. This morning, I am still excited and deeply stirred by a dream adventure in which I was in the situation and seemingly the body of a Royal Air Force pilot in World War II. I have known him, perhaps, since before my present life. As I pause for my dog to sniff a fire hydrant, I think about him, and a nurse that he loved, and what was going on in the dream. I feel a deep sense of communion with this man, who died before I was born. I feel that somehow I am present in his life, and he is active in mind. As on most days, I make it my practice to notice three new things in the two blocks we walk before we get to the big park. A license plate is often one of them. The one I notice today belongs to a registered nurse. This speaks to me, Over all the years I have been teaching Active Dreaming, the nursing profession has been the #1 occupational group represented in my workshops. Nurses have so many practical applications for the techniques. It speaks to me again, even more strongly, because of the dream that is walking with me. The Pilot loved a nurse. In the park, as we walk round the lake, I am simply open to what the world gives me. This morning, I nod to the beautiful weeping willow across the water. Her hair, which was green last week, is yellow and thinning as winter comes on. I come home, grab a full mug of coffee, and sit down to type up my dream report and my notes on what I observed in the world around me. In my Sidewalk Tarot today, I did not notice any trumps. But there was a court card, for me, in the RN's license plate. Princess of Cups, perhaps. Or Princess - even Queen - of Disks. Now I will do another everyday practice: getting guidance from a book. This may be called bibliomancy, literally "divination by the book". But today I am content with stichomancy, "divination by the line." I have already chosen the book. I am going back to Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher whose fragments tickle the cognitive brain and arouse and delight the imagination. I am using the translation, with extensive commentaries, by Charles H. Kahn. The book falls open. I close my eyes and let my pointing finger decide which line will be the one for today. I open my eyes. My finger is pointing at fragment C (for 100, in Kahn's numeration, B24 in the old Diels and Kranz collection). The translation reads:Gods and men honor those who fall in battle. I'm not immediately thrilled. War and violence and blood-stained heroes. Oh dear. Yet when I go back to the original Greek and consider levels of meaning, I feel a deep sense of confirmation of the truth and importance of my dream, which took me into the life of a very brave man who was killed in a war.

ἀρηϊφάτους θεοὶ τιμῶσι καὶ ἄνθρωποι

The literal translation is "Gods and men honor those slain by Ares." The line from Heraclitus deepens my sense from my dream that there is community between the dead and the living, between mortals and immortals: communion as well as communication. I write a one-liner for the morning.

I am in communion with the dead. They are alive in me, and I am alive in them.

I write this again on an index card, in the fairest hand I can manage. I place the card in a deck of similar cards that contain dream summaries, thoughts for the day and similar inscriptions. I have several of these hand-made decks. They include hundred of cards written in other hands, by people who play the Coincidence Card game I invented in my workshops; you can find the rules for that in my book The Three "Only" Things. When I want to use cartomancy as an everyday oracle, I will often pluck from one of my private decks rather than a set of cards produced by others according to a formal system. This is the dreamer's way: fresh words, spontaneous images. Still, there are ancient springs that are ever-renewing. This week, I'll stich (no typo) with Heraclitus.Walking to the Willow. Photo (c) Robert Moss

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

When embarking on a creative project, I often think of the Greeks, who thought it was always a good idea to invoke the muse, or creative spirit. Homer's Odyssey is a famous example. At the very beginning, the author invokes the muse of poetry, "daughter of Zeus". In Robert Fitzgerald's version, he prays, “Through me tell the story." In the more recent Robert Fagles translation, he says,

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns

driven time and again off course, once he had plundered

the hallowed heights of Troy.

The Odyssey is the tale of a wanderer, a “man
of many ways” (polytropos) who was
“harried for years on end” after he plundered the sacred places of Troy. His homecoming was
delayed, within sight of Ithaca,
when his men killed and feasted on the sacred cattle of the sun. We read in
this that we must do the work for a higher purpose than filling our bellies. The key thing is to call in the larger power. In the Fitzgerald version:

Of these adventures, Muse,
daughter of Zeus,

Tell us in our time, lift the
great song again.

Perhaps the Homeric invocation,
borrowing the Fitzgerald version, could be simplified as follows:

Sing in me, Muse, and through me
tell the story.

Tell us in our time, lift the
great song again. [Odyssey I, lines 1 & 18]

Note that the Muse here (mousa) is not yet job-specific; the
early Greeks did not divide up musing functions between the nine nymphs
familiar to the Renaissance. At the oldest level of the Muse cult, there appear
to have been three, not nine, Muses. Pausanias, greatest of ancient travel guides, preserves
a tradition of two generations of Muses; the first were daughters of Uranus
and Gaia, the second of Zeus and Mnemosyine. He named the three primal Muses as Melete (Practise), Aiode (Song), and Mneme (Memory). In both versions, as mother goddess (Mnemosyne) or as muse (Mneme), Memory is a primary force in creation. This inspires me to remember to call on a greater power - call it muse or creative spirit or daimon - to favor and help in creative work. To do this well, we can't just borrow old words, however grand, from a dead poet, even if he stands above almost all the others in the ranks of the Dead Poets Society. We must come up with fresh words to entertain and engage those greater powers. Before writing my most recent book, The Boy Who Died and Came Back, I wrote an invocation, clearly influenced by the way Homer addressed his Muse, but fresh and original and true to the new material. Indeed, this poetic "Offering" became a plan for the whole book:

Offering

Sing in me, creative spirit
of the boy who died and came back
and the man who flew through the black sun
and returned to walk the roads of this world
as the envoy of a deeper world;
and of how (being human)
he falls down and gets up, over and over,
forgets and remembers,
remembers and forgets.

Let me explain through his story
how the world is a playground, not a prison
when we awaken to the game behind the games.
Let this story help those who read it
to find their bigger and braver stories
and live them, and tell them well enough
to entertain the spirits,
win the indulgence of the gods
and bring through effortless healing.

On the way to writing my current book, I wrote a poem as an initial offering to my creative spirit. For now, that is between me and the Muse. If you have a creative venture in mind, you might want to consider finding your own words to invite the participation of your own creative spirits.

Monday, December 1, 2014

As I work on a new book, I am reminded of one of the basic rules of life: If we wait until we are fully prepared in order to do something, we may never get it done. Perfection is not available in our human condition. It's important to do things before we think we are ready. A case in point, mined from my own journals in the period when I was working on my book The Secret History of Dreaming:

I've spent the past few days reading and sketching my way into a chapter about Jung and Pauli. I have been prey to both the temptations and the performance anxiety associated with this theme.

One of the temptations is to wait until I have read or re-read the 18 volumes of Jung's Collected Works (I own nine of these volumes, plus five volumes of selections from the others) and his memoirs and letters, and at least half a dozen of the biographies, and a dozen of the studies of his approach to synchronicity (all of which are also on my shelves or my desk). There’s also a strong temptation to wait until I have found someone to explain Pauli’s Exclusion Principle, and Riemann Surfaces, and Violation of Parity and the Fine Structure Constant to me, and exactly where and why he differed with Einstein and (on another front) with Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen School, and the whole debate over symmetry - and until I have found someone else to disinter and translate Pauli's full correspondence with Aniela Jaffe and Marie-Louise von Franz. Oh yes, and of course to delay getting on with this chapter until I have hunted down the text of Schopenhauer's Essay on Spirit-Seeing, which turns out to have been a critical influence on Pauli's approach to dreams and reality and - after he pushed Jung to read or re-read it - on Jung as well (but is almost completely unavailable in English today and which I have - so far - been unable to locate online).

At the very least, I realize, I want to go through the entire Jung-Pauli correspondence yet again (and the 400 Pauli dreams summarized and analyzed previously in Jung's Psychology and Alchemy) page by page, checking every reference, grounding every allusion in the personal and general history of their lives and their time, making sure I have missed nothing and understood everything.

The performance anxiety centers on knowing that I understand Pauli’s physics no better than Jung, and do not have the advantage of having Pauli around to give me personal tutorials. And on the fact that there are a thousand Jungians (maybe many more) around ready to howl at any misrepresentation of the master.

There is only one satisfactory response to such temptations and concerns.

Thursday, November 27, 2014

The Little Prince is sad. He has left his planet and the rose he cared for. Now on Earth, he is devastated to find there are thousands of roses, when he thought his was unique. He meets a strange, pretty animal that greets him from under an apple tree. It is a fox. The Little Prince asks the fox to play with him. Fox tells him, "I cannot play with you because I have not been tamed." The Little Prince does not know the meaning of this word "tamed". He has to ask three times before the fox tells him that "to be tamed" is "to establish ties." How is that done? It takes time, the fox instructs. If the Little Prince wishes to tame him, he must meet him in the meadow at a certain time every day and sit at a certain distance. Each day, the Little Prince may move a little closer. In this way, the fox is eventually tamed and is able to reveal the secret of life.

It's a lovely story, from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's beloved
fable The Little Prince, known to most of us from childhood. The
secret the fox is about to give is one of the great moments
of clear and simple revelation in world literature. But he can only give it
when he has been "tamed".
Now it seems improbable that any fox would ask to be
tamed in the sense of being house-broken or put on a leash or made to obey
commands. The critical word "tamed" is a correct, but imperfect,
translation of Saint-Exupéry's original term apprivoisé. In French, “to tame” an animal (or person) in the sense
of making them submissive is dompter;
to turn something wild into a domesticated being is domestiquer.
Apprivoiser has a different
lilt. In early medieval French usage, it means to make something less savage (but not domesticated), to make
something alien more familiar. For the poet-prince Charles d’Orléans, apprivoiser is to make someone gentler,
softer, more tractable. The fox tells the Little Prince that the way to bring
this about is créer liens, to make
links or ties.

Synonyms for apprivoisier
might include “to gentle” or “to befriend”. As the fox uses the word,
it is about establishing the kind of connection that will make your relationship unique. Once gentled (apprivoisé) the fox is no longer one of a thousand foxes that hunt
chickens and are pursued by hunters; he is your special friend. Once a rose has
befriended you, it is no longer one of a hundred thousand roses; it is your rose.

“Here is my secret,” the fox,
befriended, says to the Little Prince. “It is very simple. You can only see
clearly with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes."
Fox has two more secrets, all of
them things that humans have forgotten.
“It is the time you lost for the sake
of the rose that made the rose so important.”
Then, never to be forgotten: Tu deviens responsible pour toujours de ce
que tu as apprivoisé. “You are responsible, forever, for everything you
have gentled. You are responsible for your rose.”

I think of an old white oak, a tree that I know that knows
me. Its image shines in my mind as the Little Prince’s rose shines in his. When
I need to know whether other thoughts or visions are to be trusted, I sometimes
let the oak rise and rustle in my inner senses, to confirm or caution.
I think of the red-tailed hawk who
dropped from the sky to guide me and, as I came to know, to do something more:
to befriend me and, in its own wildness, to gentle me. Elle m’a apprivoisé.I think of how Death has come to me, over and over, in personal guise, sometimes as a Hindu god who speaks in the accent of an Oxbidge-educated maharajah. In gentling me, Death has found it amusing to play the gentleman. Now I see the brilliance of the French translators of The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead in
devising the title Apprivoiser la
Mort par le Rêve for my book. “To Gentle Death
through Dreaming.”

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

It's a rule of skin, for me, that truth comes with goosebumps (or chicken skin, if you like). There is a science of shivers, which involves learning to recognize and respect what is going on when something exceptional is in the air and your body responds even before your mind can make sense of it. For the ancients, and in shamanic traditions, trembling for reasons other than cold or external danger has always been regarded as a sign of the advent of the numinous, the coming of gods or spirits. I recorded a recent dream that seemed to take me deep into this realm:

How to Know When the God is Present

I am explaining to a large group of students how to read the
signs that announce the advent of the god Apollo at his oracle, and confirm
that true messages will be delivered by his priestess. The sacrificial goat
starts shaking from the hooves up when the holy water is poured over it.
Everything in the environment begins to tremble as if stirred by an unseen
wind. The priestess called Pythia, who has been drinking from the sacred
spring, sees movement in the bowl of spring water she holds in her lap as she
sits on the tripod. The laurel leaves on the branch in her other hand are
shaking and murmuring.

Inside the dream, I felt educated pleasure in being able to explain these things clearly. I woke with a mild shiver of recognition, and a deep sense of satisfaction.

Dreams set us research assignments, and this one sent me back to the books, to refresh my memory on the practice of divination in the ancient world, especially at the famous Greek oracle of Delphi, where the priestess known as the Pythia, or Pythoness, was consulted by the rulers of cities and nations. Through the surviving sources, starting with Aeschylus' play The Eumenides, I confirmed my dream self's version of the operations of the Pythia. In preparing to become the oracle, she bathes
in the sacred spring and invokes all the deities
associated with Delphi by name, starting with Themis and Phoebe, daughters of
the Earth goddess Gaia, and continuing through Zeus, Poseidon, Dionysus and
Apollo, who she hopes will speak through her in the presence of a client. She makes burned offering
of laurel leaves and barley meal on an altar of the temple. She enters the
adyton (sacred chamber) and mounts the golden tripod chair. In one hand she
holds a laurel branch, in the other a shallow bowl. She sits quietly until the
laurel leaves start to quiver. The trembling seizes her hand, moves up her arm
to her shoulders and chest. Her whole body starts shaking violently as it has
been seized by giant hands. This is confirmation that the god is present and
that his speaker is in the necessary state of enthousiasmos to deliver true
messages.

The bit about the goats fascinated me. In Diodorus of Sicily's World History, I reviewed again the legend of the foundation of the oracle of Delphi. Long before the great
temple was built, when the area was wilderness, a goat herder noticed that some
of his animals were behaving strangely. They were shaking and throwing their
heads back, croaking and bleating. The herder approached them and saw they were
at a crack in the rock from which vapors were rising. When he peered down, a
strange exaltation seized him. He started shaking too. Knowledge of many things
streamed through him. His family, alarmed by his long absence, searched for him
and found him under a tree. He began to tell people their secrets without being
asked. He had become clairvoyant. News of the chasm and the power of the vapors
spread far and wide, until those in authority determined that things should be put on a orderly business footing. A priestess of blameless life would be chosen as speaker for the oracle, and access to the adyton would be banned to everyone except her attendants. It would probably be mistaken to attribute the Pythia's powers of truth-seeing to suphurous vapors from the earth, or chewing laurel leaves, or any other chemical assistance. For one thing, recent archaeology suggests the historical oracle of Delphi operated at a different site from the place - called Likoreia - where the goats were set trembling by whatever was rising from a fissure in the earth.*

But there was something else to be learned and remembered about quivering goats. Ah yes, it has to do with divination by animal sacrifice, indirectly referred to my dream-lecturer self. Goats and sheep were the preferred animals used in extispicy, divination by the entrails, a practice common throughout the ancient world and held to be of high importance in establishing the divine will in relation to human decisions. The Mesopotamian baru, a specialist in these matters, held high rank. So did the Etruscan haruspex counselor to Greeks and Romans, under both the Republic and the Empire. The liver was the preferred organ for divination, because it was thought to be a vital seat of an aspect of soul, and a kind of anchor between the spiritual world and the world of the body. For the haruspex, the best liver for
divination was one that had been just carved from the animal victim, still warm
and quivering in the diviner's hand. The Hittites liked to observe the spasms
of the dying animal as its organs were removed.

These tales of savage times say it again: truth comes with goosebumps. Personally, I can do without looking at animal livers. It's enough to notice those little - or large - shivers that come when something is going on beyond the range of ordinary perception. They are a part of what the bleep we know that we (often) don't know that we know.* On the archaeology of Likoreia and Delphi, see the vivid account in Robert Temple, Oracles of the Dead (Destiny Books).

Image: The Pythia on her tripod at Delphi, with a phiale (shallow bowl) in one hand and a laurel branch (sacred to Apollo) in the other.

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